Wasdale Head has had no mains power for a month because of a fault in the underwater cable which carries electricity to the remote dalehead. The fact that Wastwater – supplier of cooling water for Calder Hall, Britain's first nuclear reactor, and now for Sellafield nuclear reprocessing site – is England's deepest lake doesn't help; it will take "some time" to repair the line. It was laid underwater so few telegraph poles or overhead transmission lines spoilt the view.

But now the drone of backyard generators producing power for respective properties has returned. It brings back memories of pre-1977 times when generators were the only power source for the small community nestling in the dalehead below Kirkfell, Great Gable, Lingmell and the Scafells. Only at weekends did the noise from the climbers' bar drown the generators' drone.

One night the racket was increased by shouts and thudding of a rugby ball coming from an adjacent barn. The uproar prompted legendary landlord Wilson Pharaoh to drag open the barn doors and stand swaying as he took in the motley groups – members of the Alpha Mountaineering Club and their rival Manchester Gritstone Club, and girlfriends with dishevelled beehive hair-dos calling for blood.

Wilson had previously quelled trouble in his pub by throwing big men out. Now the biggest man himself was spent. Instead, he appealed to one of his own, a Cumbrian Pete Turnbull. "Stop them, Peter," he said. The climber so requested lifted a 100lb bale of straw above his head and strode around the barn, ready to take on all-comers like Kirk Douglas in the film The Vikings (also the name of a test-piece on Tophet Wall, pioneered by Richard McHardy who, too, was in the barn that night). Only one sound broke the resulting silence: the droning of the Petter diesel generator producing the power for the hotel.